ChapterPDF Available

The Double Life of Kertbeny

Authors:
  • Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence

Abstract

Today, many perceive the word homosexual to be a medical term, mainly because of the fact that from the late 19th century until the 1970s this expression was monopolised by the medical approach interpreting same-sex attraction to be a pathology, degeneration or illness. Still, it is important to remember that Kertbeny introduced the word homosexual in the course of the struggle for homosexuals’ rights in a surprisingly modern human rights argumentation. Kertbeny did not seek biological arguments to use for the liberation of homosexuals, – i.e. a relatively small social group with limited power to further their own interests – instead, he made the point that the modern state should extend the principle of not intervening in the private lives of citizens to cover homosexuals, too. Looking back almost one and a half centuries we can state that the case made by Kertbeny helped a significant, modern social movement – the struggle against the discrimination of those who enjoy same-sex relationships – to emerge.
... Besides his mostly secretive involvement in homosexual rights activism, Kertbeny was also an active supporter of free movement, publicly demanding the elimination of passports several times in his life, especially when he ran into trouble because of not having a valid passport. 48 Kertbeny's recent afterlife ...
... and these terms did not enter English medical discourses until the late 19 th Century (Sedgwick 1991;Takács 2004;Weeks 1977). Second, directly connecting "heterosexual" to "normative", the concept "heteronormativity" emphasises the already-existing structure of gender and sexual hierarchy, but provides much less space for further probing the possible fragility and fracture in this "hetero-normativity" connection, which may in return de-construct the very connection itself. ...
Book
Full-text available
With anthropological tools and feminist ethics, Yiran Wang in her doctoral project studies the everyday realities, imaginations and aspirations of same-sex attracted women living in the second decade of the 21st Century in mainland China. Wang’s analysis of these women’s “becoming” journeys weaves the data collected from ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai and Yunnan Province, China, together with her own personal life experiences, cases discussed in other scholars’ works, and discourses and materials circulated in mass media. Inspired by Rosi Braidotti’s theory of “nomadic subjectivity”, Wang maps out how “subjectivity/zhutixing”, a concept more etic than emic in Chinese everyday language and context, can be understood, observed, narrated and embodied in non-heteronormative female experiences. Wang specifically discusses five interrelated themes: globalisation; heteronormativity; sexual identity and gender expression; love and sex; coming out of the closet. Although these are not new topics in the existing scholarly literature of Chinese gender and sexuality, Wang’s revisits to them constitute a series of critical and creative explorations of “self” and “other”, researcher and the researched subjects, desire and body, translating and transnational, past and present, home and hope, in the latest Chinese sociocultural context and the highly globalised world. Thus, Wang’s personal journey and the production of her PhD thesis have also been embodied in each other’s becoming process. (URL: https://dare.uva.nl/search?identifier=e1b1dc6f-6c0f-46bc-915b-7780123495bb)
... It was also during this period that homosexual identity was politicized, leading to early forms of activism in the late 1800s (Hekma forthcoming). The word "homosexuell" itself (it was first written in German) was coined in 1864, when the Hungarian journalist Karoly Maria Kertbeny used it in a letter to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (Takács 2004). Ulrichs, a homosexual German lawyer, is often considered to be the first homosexual activist; he mobilized against the extension of Prussian Paragraph 175 -which criminalized same-sex intercourse -to Catholic southern Germany, where same-sex intercourse had been decriminalized prior to the German unification of 1871. ...
Book
Full-text available
This book explores the alleged uniqueness of the European experience, and investigates its ties to a long history of LGBT and queer movements in the region. These movements, the book argues, were inspired by specific ideas about Europe, which they sought to realize on the ground through activism.
... Mas o que é uma relação g0y? Pelas diversas inserções na mídia (Cecarello & Castro, 2015), pelos diversos materiais dispostos em rede sociais, blogs (Ptgay, 2016), pelo exposto no principal website brasileiro (Heterogoy, 2014) (Takacs, 2004;Prieto, 2006), no cenário após a década de 1950, devido a imensa repercussão de Kinsey et al. ...
Article
Full-text available
A categorização é fundamental para o nosso pensamento, nossa percepção, ação e posicionamento no mundo. Todas as vezes que percebemos algo como um tipo de coisa, ou como parte de alguma coisa, estamos a categorizar e a recorrer ao uso de processos cognitivos. Nessa perspectiva, as novas categorias homoeróticas na contemporaneidade surgem de que axiomas? O que é gay, o que é g0y (g-zero-y) e o que não é? Bem como, qual é a fronteira desses conceitos com o comportamento masculino heteroflexível? São questões instigantes sob o enfoque da cognição, da categorização; e, com base em verificação ontológica, este artigo enfatiza o papel de validação exercido pela “confirmação” e “desconfirmação" das crenças acerca de categorias mais fluidas de comportamentos sexuais masculinos que podem estar externalizados. Nesse âmbito, registra-se que não se encontra na proposição g-zero-y erros sejam no sentido da redundância, de inconsistência interna, de partição ou de circularidade conceptual.
Chapter
While many campuses seek to find ways to engage, support, and retain LGBTQIA+ students, there is often a lack of material in the curriculum and student-facing supports, such as libraries, multicultural centers, etc., that show the value and realities of the historical connection between academics and the pursuit of gender liberation. More historical elements, better representation, and connection could benefit all students. This chapter proposes one such history to aid that purpose: the early “Gay Liberation Movement” that saw interaction between research universities, various fields, and organizations seeking to increase opportunities and legal protections for members of the LGBTQIA+ community. By providing this history and encouraging campuses to embrace building it into their curriculum and campuses as evidence of how academia has supported the pursuit of equity, it can provide a meaningful, engaging, and significant presence to benefit all students in understanding the history of the pursuit of rights and the power of higher education.
Article
This article deals with the enigmatic biography and the controversial oeuvre of Karl Maria Kertbeny (recte: Karl Maria Benkert; 1824-1882). Kertbeny was a representative of the so-called Hungarus identity, a convinced Hungarian of non-Hungarian mother tongue. He worked primarily as a journalistic mediator and literary translator and was largely responsible for the image of Hungary and of Hungarian culture and literature in German-speaking countries, especially in the period from the middle of the 19th century onwards. In the article, the overly critical attitude that posterity took towards Kertbeny is set to some extent straight.
Chapter
The contributors to Turning Archival trace the rise of “the archive” as an object of historical desire and study within queer studies and examine how it fosters historical imagination and knowledge. Highlighting the growing significance of the archival to LGBTQ scholarship, politics, and everyday life, they draw upon accounts of queer archival encounters in institutional, grassroots, and everyday repositories of historical memory. The contributors examine such topics as the everyday life of marginalized queer immigrants in New York City as an archive; secondhand vinyl record collecting and punk bootlegs; the self-archiving practices of grassroots lesbians; and the decolonial potential of absences and gaps in the colonial archives through the life of a suspected hermaphrodite in colonial Guatemala. Engaging with archives from Africa to the Americas to the Arctic, this volume illuminates the allure of the archive, reflects on that which resists archival capture, and outlines the stakes of queer and trans lives in the archival turn. Contributors. Anjali Arondekar, Kate Clark, Ann Cvetkovich, Carolyn Dinshaw, Kate Eichhorn, Javier Fernández-Galeano, Emmett Harsin Drager, Elliot James, Marget Long, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Daniel Marshall, María Elena Martínez, Joan Nestle, Iván Ramos, David Serlin, Zeb Tortorici
Article
Full-text available
Analyzing the principles, considerations, and official explanations underpinning the (de)criminalization of sexual relations between same-sex partners can highlight that around the mid-twentieth century medicalizing references were used in legal and societal judgments on same-sex intimacy in Hungary (and elsewhere). In this study, we want to illustrate the medicalization process of social issues that otherwise seem difficult to "solve" (i.e., these issues, in this case, were put within a psycho-medical ambit) by focusing on a twentieth-century historical example from Hungary. The background of the decriminalization of consensual sexual acts between adult men in the 1961 Hungarian Penal Code will be explored in detail using previously unknown original archival material from 1958. This article will introduce the changes proposed by the Neurology Committee of the Health Science Council (HSC; Egészségügyi Tudományos Tanács) in 1958 leading to the HSC's unanimous support for a proposal to decriminalize "unnatural fornication" between consenting adults and to the actual decriminalization of homosexuality (i.e., decriminalization of consensual sexual acts between adult men) in 1961. The empirical foundation of the present study includes archival records from the National Archives of Hungary and other primary sources.
Article
This article examines a unique source for Icelandic queer history, the diary of Latin School student Ólafur Davíðsson from 1881–1882. In the diary, Ólafur describes his love relationship with a fellow pupil at the school. The article argues that the diary can be seen as a map of queer space in nineteenth-century Reykjavík. Close reading of the diary reveals the boundaries within which queer relationships could be formed and were accepted. This queer space was centred on the Reykjavík Latin School, a secondary boarding school strongly focused on the Classics. The article utilizes Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to analyse the special character of the Latin School in Reykjavík society. At the school, young men from all around the country lived together in close quarters, reading Ancient Greek texts that extolled same-sex love. The school also introduced students to new ideological trends from Scandinavia, above all realism and atheism, which allowed students to free themselves from the restraining influence of traditional societal norms and religion. The existence of a heterotopic queer space such as this in as peripheral a society as nineteenth-century Iceland could have interesting implications for other remote and peripheral areas in Scandinavia and beyond.
Chapter
Sexual appetite assumed a significant role in the pathologisation of perversions in the nineteenth century. Ideas of balance, frequency and amount functioned to govern sexual normality. Who is “normal” was as much a question of appetite as it was of object choice. This chapter examines how the medicalisation of sexual appetite in nineteenth-century sexology emerged through the technique of the patient case history. It considers two aspects of this technique: first, how the case history presented sexual appetite as a structuring device in the expansion of taxonomies of sexual perversions, and second, how this was accomplished by inextricably tying the imagination and narrative to the notion of sexual excess. The imagination formed the bedrock of sexuality itself and was treated as both essential and suspicious. The patient case history was a discursive device linking pathology, excess and the imagination. It constituted a technique for the ordering of knowledge on sexual appetite and its dissemination.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.